Several broadcasters provide online social interactions around broadcast programming. The most common type is chat. For example, the Nickelodeon cable television channel frequently has an associated chat session on its web site, http://www.nick.com, where the chat session corresponds to what is being broadcast on air. This is also very popular with cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC, which frequently host chat sessions around news programs, such as Larry King Live.
With the advent of Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), Digital Video Recorders (DVRs), on demand content viewing, downloadable television programs via services such as Apple's iTunes music store, and Direct TV, the viewers for a particular program will be watching the program at different times and are therefore no longer synchronized. Further, even when a number of viewers are watching recorded programming at the same time, the viewers will likely be at different locations during playback. For example, a first viewer may be watching the beginning of a recorded program while a second viewer is watching the end of the recorded program. As a result, the traditional systems that enable viewers to chat while watching a television program are no longer desirable. More specifically, a viewer watching the beginning of a recorded program will likely not desire to chat with a viewer watching the end of the recorded program because the ending of the program may be revealed. Thus, there remains a need for a system and method for establishing social networks between viewers watching recorded media content.